Gotham Book Mart - The Building

The Building

The building that housed the Gotham Book Mart for the longest period of its existence was purchased by Miss Steloff from Columbia University in 1946 for $65,000. Somewhere in between, after selling the store to Andreas Brown, Steloff donated the building to the American Friends of the Hebrew University Foundation with the proviso that they give Brown the option to later buy it back at $1,000,000. In 1987, Steloff filed suit to enforce the intended proviso, and the two parties apparently settled. In 1988, Andreas Brown bought the building back from them for $1,000,000.

In 1995, Joanne Carson (2nd wife of Johnny Carson) filed suit against Brown, alleging she had loaned him $640,000 in 1988 and 1991 to purchase and repair the building, and she wanted her money returned with interest. Carson had apparently become acquainted with Brown through their mutual friendship with Truman Capote. Brown and Carson met after Capote's death while Brown was appraising Capote's papers. In 1997, the suit was settled, with Brown agreeing to pay her back $1.4 million by February 28 of the year 2000.

In 2001, Brown put the five-story town house building up for sale with an asking price of $7.9 million. In 2003, the building was sold for $7.2 million to Boris Aranov, who also owned another adjacent building.

Brown reopened the store under a slightly new name, "The Gotham Book Mart & Gallery", in 2004 just a few blocks away at 16 East 46th Street in the store space previously occupied by the H. P. Kraus rare books store. Leonard Lauder, a cosmetics industry billionaire and executive of Estée Lauder Companies, and Edmondo Schwartz, a real estate developer, arranged to buy the building for $5.2 million in order to assist the Gotham and Brown by leasing it back to him. In 2006, the store fell behind in its monthly $51,000 rent, and the landlords initiated eviction proceedings. A judge authorized the city marshal to seize the inventory.

There were various stories for why Brown fell behind in the rent. According to him, he had recently endured three hernia operations and was struggling to save the store from closing by inventorying the over $3 million worth of books and posting them on the internet. In the months since the move from the previous location, the staff appeared to have failed to get any of the inventory online. By other accounts, he may have lost momentum after the transition of selling and moving from the old building, and he may have invested too much in more book inventory and paid employees too much. Other factors that could have been involved included the fact that Barnes & Noble opened a bookstore just around the corner from the Gotham, and also that general book-buying habits of consumers had shifted with the advent of the internet age.

The primary factors affecting the store appears to have been a combination of the rising rent for real estate in Manhattan, competition from book superstores, and Brown's mismanagement of the business—factors which influenced the closures of a number of other venerable bookstores during the same period.

On May 22, 2007, the city auctioned off the store's inventory to a small crowd each of whom had put down a $1,000 deposit in order to attend. Attendees included book collectors and other book store owners. Ultimately, the estimated $3 million worth of inventory was all bought up in one large lot for a bid of only $400,000 by the representative of the landlords.